Many organizations (such as private companies, government agencies, publicly-traded companies) rely on optical character recognition (OCR) technology to process paper forms, such as invoices, bank statements, time sheets, etc., in order to store information extracted from the forms. In some cases, different organizations use the same form. For example, Company A has customers in Companies B, C, and D. Each of Companies B, C, and D (or, rather, representatives thereof) receive filled-out forms that originated from Company A. However, in order to process the filled-out forms, each of Companies B, C, and D needs to first register one or more form templates (that reflect blank versions of the filled-out forms) with their respective form OCR server. In other words, form templates are not shared by multiple organizations. Such an approach where each organization must register form templates for forms that require OCR processing increases work that needs to be performed and increases the cost of processing since form template registration can be an expensive task.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.